the European Court for Human Rights has found that Turkey could have but failed to take proper actions to protect Armanian-Turkish journalist, Hrant Dink. Dink had openly criticized the mass murders of Armanians in Antolia at the end of the Ottoman Empire and thus gained the attention of the Turkish government as a potential threat to bringing bad publicity to Turkey. Turkey also failed to properly investigate his murder. Turkey has blocked the investigation into whether their own police forces in Istanbul and Trabzon were involved in the murder for the past three years. Due to the European Court's verdict, Turkey will now be put under spotlight to re-open the case and provide a proper trial and proper justice for those involved. Dink was convicted of "insulting Turkishness" and although his lawyers argued that his freedom of expression and right to a fair trial had been violated, their pleas fell upon deaf ears. Dink was murdered shortly after. The European Court ruled that Dink's conviction of "insulting Turkishness" violated his right to free speech because his words did not incite violence or hatred. Even after numerous intelligence reports were received by Turkey, the Turkish government failed to protect him from assassination. Turkey has been ordered to pay a stipend of 105,000 euros to Dink's family but other than paying this sum of money Turkey has not made any advances to re-open the case only to "try to prevent actions like this from happening in the future".
The Ottoman Empire fell in 1923, 87 years ago. Dink was criticizing a government that ended almost a century ago, why does it matter what he published about Turkey at that time? The fact that Turkey is refusing to cooperate with authorities to me shows that they have something to hide. If Turkey really wanted to stop bad publicity they should handle events like this more pro-actively. Events like these make people fear for their lives because of the things they say when freedom of speech allows these same people to say what they so choose, as long as it is not untrue, does not incite violence, and does not incite hate. Murdering Dink for what he said about a long fallen empire seems to be a paranoid Stalin-esque tactic of crowd control. Orwell's 1984 novel seems to be quickly surfacing in our 2010 world.
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